


The Sunlight in My Growing

by remy (iamremy)



Series: 12 days of wincestmas - 2020 [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Established Relationship, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Protective Dean Winchester, dean patches sam up and sings to him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:01:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22243747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamremy/pseuds/remy
Summary: Sam and Dean are kidnapped by hunters looking to avenge the Apocalypse. Dean rescues a hurt Sam and patches him up after.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: 12 days of wincestmas - 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1601026
Comments: 18
Kudos: 140





	The Sunlight in My Growing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sintari (OriginalSintari)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalSintari/gifts).



> im not even gonna apologize for how much i adore sam whump. hey, i never claimed to be a good person ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> warning for graphic descriptions of sam's injuries.

Dean closes his eyes, gritting his teeth together as he hears another muffled scream. Part of him wants to know what they’re doing to Sam, but another part of him is grateful that Sam’s in another room. He doesn’t think he could keep himself together if he could actually _see_ Sam.

The screaming doesn’t leave much to the imagination, though.

He redoubles his efforts to saw through his bindings with the nail file he’d hidden in his boot. His fingers are bleeding from the effort, and his wrists have been chafed raw, but his brain doesn’t even register the pain right now. All he knows is that he has to get to Sam.

Another scream. A tear falls from Dean’s eye before he can stop it. Blood drips down his hands, making his fingers slippery as he tries to saw through the coarse rope. “Please, please, please oh fuck,” he whispers, a desperate plea to no one.

The file almost slips, but Dean grabs on to it at the last moment, the point cutting into the meat of his palm. He bites off a curse and manages to maneuver it upright, and continues sawing.

Sam is past words now. Has been for a while. Whatever they’re doing to him, it has him letting out raw, guttural sounds of pain, and if Dean closes his eyes he’s back in hell, being tortured with Sam’s face on the rack below his eyes.

The file slips from his hands just as he manages to saw through the last of the ropes. He lets it fall, pulling his wrists apart and bringing his arms to the front, rotating his shoulders to get his blood moving again. From there it’s two minutes for him to untie his feet and get off the hard metal chair, and locate his knife. Their kidnappers are not particularly smart, as proven by the fact that they left Dean unattended with his weapons in clear view. They probably thought their stupid rope could hold him.

Dean is going to kill every last one of them.

His hands hurt when he wraps his fingers around the familiar knife handle, but he pays it no mind. In the next room is his little brother, the love of his life, screaming himself raw, and that’s where his focus lies.

Both the kidnappers – human, because they’re literally worse than demons when they want to be – have their backs to Dean. He spares a second to wonder at their limitless stupidity, before burying his knife to the hilt in the nearest one’s back.

“What the fuck–” begins the second one, pausing with his own knife halfway to Sam’s throat, but he doesn’t get to say more than that; Dean rips his knife out of the first guy and shoves it straight into the second one’s throat, moving it sideways in a brutal motion. The man falls to the ground, gargling blood, hands flying to his throat in a futile effort to stem the bleeding.

Dean doesn’t watch. He has eyes only for Sam, slumped in the chair they’ve tied him to, hair falling over his face. What scares him is that Sam is not moving.

“Hey,” he says, falling to his knees next to Sam and putting a hand under his chin to raise his head. “Sammy, hey.”

Sam’s eyes are half-shut, face slack as Dean holds his head up. He doesn’t respond. His skin is terrifyingly pale.

“Sammy, baby, hey.”

Behind him he can hear the man continue gurgling; he doesn’t even turn. The fucker will die eventually. Dean hopes it hurts like hell.

There are twin pools of blood around Sam’s bare feet, and his hands look like mincemeat. Sam’s lip is split and bleeding sluggishly too, and one eye is swollen shut, ringed in bruise-blue. When Dean puts his free hand on Sam’s back, it comes away covered in blood too, and Dean has to swallow bile when he moves behind Sam and sees the mess they’ve made of his back.

“Fuck,” he chokes out, slicing through the ropes around Sam’s wrists. Sam’s skin is chafed too; he’s been struggling, and it shows.

Dean has to move quickly to catch Sam when he falls the moment his wrists are free. He’s completely unconscious now, and Dean lets out another curse as he presses two fingers to the soft, blood-sticky underside of Sam’s jaw. His pulse is elevated, but _there,_ and Dean lets out a bitten-off sob of relief.

“I got you,” he murmurs to Sam, untying Sam’s ankles and lifting him over his shoulder in a careful fireman’s carry. “I got you, Sammy, gonna get you fixed up, you’re gonna be good as new in no time…”

He leaves the two men choking for breath on the ground on his way out.

* * *

He breaks several laws on the way back to the bunker, going at least twice the speed limit. He doesn’t even whisper apologies to Baby the way he normally would when pushing her like this. He loves her, but he’d gladly burn her a thousand times over if it meant saving Sam.

Sam remains still in the backseat, and Dean keeps checking the rearview mirror to ensure he can still see the slow rise and fall of his chest. Every moment feels hours long, and Dean is beginning to feel like he’s back in hell again. Time seems to be running at that pace, and this scenario seems tailor-made from his worst nightmares.

He parks the Impala haphazardly in front of the bunker’s entrance, getting the door open before he lifts Sam out of the backseat. “Come on, Sammy, come on, baby,” he murmurs as he carries him as carefully as he can down the stairs while still being quick. “I got you, darlin’, you’re safe now…”

Sam is still unresponsive.

Dean’s room is closest, so that’s where he goes, setting Sam gently down on the bed before running to grab the med kit he keeps in his room for exactly this sort of situation. The infirmary is well-stocked too, but it’s so damn impersonal, and he’s got all the equipment he needs right here. It’ll be more comforting for Sam to be in a familiar room when he wakes.

None of Sam’s wounds seem too deep – just designed to be painful. Dean carefully cuts his clothes away before turning him on his front, wincing again at the cuts spanning the width of his back. They’re crooked, the edges ragged, and Dean realizes with a swoop of gut-wrenching nausea that they’d been using a dull knife. Not for the first time he regrets not taking the time to make their deaths more painful.

But of course, Sam takes priority. Always. Dean wets a rag in a bowl of warm water and begins cleaning Sam’s back gently, wiping away the blood and grime. He chokes up a little when he wipes over Sam’s old scar, the one from Jake Talley’s knife. It’s been years and years and he still can’t bear looking at it, and having it surrounded by fresh blood is making it so much worse.

“You’re okay, sweetheart,” he murmurs, just in case Sam can hear him (though Sam hasn’t so much as flinched just yet). “I got you, Sammy.”

He wipes down the wounds with an alcohol wipe and then rummages through the med kit for a 3/0 suture needle. “Definitely a step up from floss, huh?” he tells Sam with a shaky laugh as he unwraps it.

Sam doesn’t answer.

Dean bites his lip, and begins stitching Sam up. It takes him a good half an hour, and throughout that time Sam doesn’t move. It’s beginning to worry Dean, and he keeps checking Sam’s pulse and breathing, reassuring himself that Sam will be all right, he’ll be up and about soon.

When he’s done he covers the freshly-stitched wounds in clean gauze. It’s probably overkill, but he’d rather err on the side of paranoia and caution when it comes to Sam.

Next he moves to Sam’s face. Thankfully none of the cuts on it seem too deep, but Dean cleans them with Betadine anyway before covering what he can in Band-Aids and small squares of gauze.

The next shock comes when he cleans Sam’s hands to find out that he’s got over half of his fingernails missing. The rest have long wooden splinters sticking out from under them, and Dean chokes off a sob before it can leave his throat. “Oh, baby, what did they do to you?” he murmurs, wiping hastily at his eyes before grabbing the tweezers.

Sam stirs feebly when Dean grasps the first splinter with the tweezers. “Dee?” he murmurs, face scrunching up in pain, though his eyes remain closed.

Dean immediately puts his free hand on the back of Sam’s head, running his fingers through his hair gently. “Right here, Sammy,” he soothes. “Right here. You’re safe.”

Sam makes an attempt to move, and then winces, falling back on the bed. “Hey, hey, stay down, baby,” Dean says, brushing Sam’s hair away from his face and behind his ear. “You’re banged up pretty bad. Let me take care of you, okay? Let me fix you up.”

“S'bad?” Sam asks, cracking his uninjured eye open to look hazily up at Dean.

“Nah, not so bad,” Dean says, only a half-truth. “You’re not gonna be having a great few days for a while, but you’ll be fine.”

“Th'hunters?”

“Dead,” Dean replies shortly. Fuckers. Lured Sam and Dean in pretending they needed help on a hunt, and then decided to exact revenge for the goddamn _apocalypse_. It feels like a lifetime ago to Dean, and they’d fixed it anyway, hadn’t they? Everything Sam had gone through just to keep their ungrateful hides safe, God it makes Dean’s blood boil.

Sam lets out a slow exhale, and closes his eyes for a moment. Then he opens his eyes again, and asks, “What you doing?”

“Your hands,” Dean tells him, taking the tweezers up again. “This is gonna sting a little,” he informs Sam regretfully.

“S'okay,” Sam whispers. “Do it.” He closes his eyes again.

“Just hold on, okay?” Dean says, and pulls the first splinter out in a quick motion.

Sam whimpers, fingers flexing a little as he tries to form a fist, and then relaxing again when it makes the pain worse. Dean takes a deep breath, whispering apologies under his breath as he pulls out the rest of the splinters. Throughout it all Sam keeps a brave face, biting down hard on his lip so he can muffle his sounds of pain. It makes tears rise in Dean’s eyes again, but he wipes them hastily on his sleeve and continues.

Cleaning the rest of Sam’s fingers prove harder. “Do it,” Sam grits out when he notices Dean hesitating, hands hovering over Sam’s.

“Sammy, it’ll hurt,” Dean says, voice hoarse.

“’M okay,” Sam insists, squeezing his eyes shut again.

So Dean steels himself, and cleans Sam’s bare nail beds with the warm water-soaked rag, and disinfects them with Betadine, and pretends he can’t see tears dripping down Sam’s closed eyes and into the pillow underneath his head. “God, Sammy, I’m so sorry,” he says again and again, caressing Sam’s hands with his thumbs whenever he can. “I’m so sorry.” He kisses the back of one of Sam’s hands, and then begins the slow, careful task of bandaging his fingers.

Sam’s breathing heavily by the time Dean is done, and he doesn’t say a word when Dean begins to clean his wrists. He remains quiet as Dean wraps gauze around them, and is totally still while Dean repeats his ministrations on his ankles. It’s only when Dean touches the soles of his feet that Sam lets out a half-choked sob.

Immediately Dean is at his side, med kit forgotten on the nightstand. “Sammy?”

“’M all righ’,” Sam tells him, biting down on his lip once more. He’s split it open again, and Dean carefully thumbs the blood away, wiping it off on his own shirt. “Jus’… my feet.”

Dean looks, and can’t help a harsh “ _Fuck_ ” when he notices the cuts spanning the width of Sam’s arches. Clearly to prevent him from running. “Fuck,” he whispers again. “I swear if I could kill them all over again–” He stops midway, and wipes angrily at his eyes.

“S'okay,” Sam tells him again. “Jus’ – jus’ do it, Dee. Fast,” he adds.

“Yeah, okay,” Dean says, picking up the rag again. “Hold on just a little bit longer for me, okay, Sammy? Just a few minutes. Can you do that for me, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” whispers Sam.

So Dean hardens himself, and gets to work again. Clean. Disinfect. Wipe Sam’s tears away. Wipe his own tears off his face. Suture. Clean and disinfect again. Cover.

“I’ll get you something for the pain, okay?” Dean tells him when he’s done, rubbing at Sam’s ankle.

Sam nods, trying to curl up as much as he can with his injured hands and feet and the fact that he’s lying on his front. “‘Kay,” he whispers.

Dean digs out the heavy-duty stuff from the mid kit, and casts a glance at the expiration date. They’re good, so he puts the bottles down on the nightstand and runs to Sam’s room to fill a glass of water from the sink in it. He returns in under a minute to find Sam in a sitting position, a light sheen of sweat on his face.

“What the hell, Sammy,” he says, exasperated, as he shakes out a couple pills from the bottles for Sam.

“Hadta sit up for th'pills,” Sam manages to say. He still looks far too pale for Dean’s liking, and it looks like just the simple act of sitting up has taken a lot out of him.

“Coulda waited for me to help, man,” Dean chastises as he gives Sam the painkillers and antibiotics, and then helps him take a few gulps of water.

“’M fine,” Sam argues weakly.

Dean just sighs, putting the glass aside. “Sure,” he says, not having the energy to argue anymore. He feels drained suddenly, soul-tired, and his fingers are shaking when he bends over to unlace his boots.

“Dee?” Sam says softly.

“I’m all right, babe,” Dean mutters, managing to untie his laces and kick his boots off. “Just – just tired.”

“Did you get hurt?” Sam asks.

Dean shakes his head before standing up and turning back around. “Wrists hurt just a little, but I’m good, Sammy,” he tells him, taking his flannel off.

“You gonna take care of it?”

“In a few,” Dean answers, hoarse. He sits back down on the bed when he’s stripped down to his boxers like Sam, and then pulls the med kit towards himself.

Sam leans forward, watching closely as Dean cleans his own wounds and bandages them. It warms Dean up, knowing Sam’s concerned for him even in the state he’s in. Always so worried for Dean.

“You’re gonna be okay, you know,” he says when he’s done.

Sam nods. “Yeah,” he says. “S'not that bad, huh? Had worse.”

That doesn’t make Dean feel much better, but he manages to give Sam a strained smile anyway. Sam returns it, one dimple showing for a second for vanishing again.

Dean reaches over to grab the blanket and pulls it up before lying down. “C'mere,” he says softly, and helps Sam shift closer to him. “Lie down, Sammy.”

He helps Sam lie down slowly on his side, and wraps an arm cautiously around Sam’s shoulders. Sam puts his head on Dean’s chest, right under his chin, and gently intertwines his bandaged fingers with Dean’s free hand.

“You comfortable?” Dean asks.

“Mm,” hums Sam, his eyes falling shut.

“How’s the pain?”

“Better,” Sam answers.

“Good,” says Dean, voice cracking. “Get some sleep, Sammy. Been a long day.”

Sam huffs out a weak laugh. “One way t'put it,” he mutters, before raising his head a little to press a feather-light kiss to Dean’s jaw.

Dean gives him a soft smile, and kisses his temple before Sam lays his head back down again. “I love you,” he tells Sam, suddenly feeling scraped raw on the inside. His heart feels like it’s been rubbed against a cheese grater. “You know that, right, Sammy? Right, baby?”

“I know,” Sam tells him, squeezing his hand as lightly as he can. “I love you too, Dee.” His sentences aren’t as slurred from pain anymore, but he’s still using his childhood nickname for Dean, and for some reason that soothes Dean like a balm. It feels good to know that no matter what, Sam is always going to look up to him for protection and reassurance.

“Yeah, I know,” Dean whispers into Sam’s hair. “I know, babe.” He doesn’t have words to express the way he feels right now, tangled up in Sam and so fucking grateful, and so damn tired.

Sam is quiet for a few minutes, long enough that Dean thinks he’s fallen asleep. That illusion is gone when Sam asks, voice beginning to slur again but from sleep this time, “Dee?”

“Yeah, Sammy?”

“Can you– can you sing?”

“You want me to sing you something?” Dean asks, surprised. Sam hasn’t asked that of him in literal years.

“Please,” Sam says. He sounds so young suddenly that it makes Dean’s heart ache again.

“Of course, babe,” he says, rubbing circles into Sam’s shoulder with his thumb.

“Thanks,” Sam murmurs, wiggling a little in Dean’s arms before he settles again.

Dean kisses his hair. “Any time, Sammy.” And then he begins singing, the first song that comes to mind.

_It is the springtime of my loving  
The second season I am to know  
You are the sunlight in my growing  
So little warmth I’ve felt before_

Sam’s breathing evens out slowly, getting deeper the longer that Dean keeps singing. He’s hoarse, and his voice keeps cracking, but it doesn’t seem to matter to Sam, whose entire body is relaxing, melting into Dean, his head growing heavier as he gets closer to sleep. Unable to help a smile, Dean continues singing.

“I know that I love you so,” he whispers, “oh, but I know…”

In the morning, he’s going to get up earlier than normal so he can give Sam his antibiotics and painkillers on time. He’s going to go over Sam’s injuries again, and he’s going to fuss and helicopter and smother Sam until Sam’s making bitchfaces at him and accusing him of mother-henning. And then he’ll crack a joke, and Sam will laugh against his will, and they’ll be all right. 

They’ll be all right.

**Author's Note:**

> the song dean sings is [rain song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ4uzD_hLds) by led zeppelin.
> 
> please leave a comment and let me know what you thought!
> 
> love,  
> remy


End file.
